Archive for July, 2006
uses of blogs hits the stands
Jul 31st
Uses of Blogs
Blurb:
As the first edited collection of scholarly articles on blogging by experts and practitioners in a wide range of fields, Uses of Blogs offers a broad spectrum of perspectives on current and emerging uses of blogs. While blogging is rapidly developing into a mainstream activity for Internet users, the actual application of blogs in specific contexts has so far been under-explored. Because there are a variety of styles of blogging – from de facto news sites to marketing blogs, blogs as learning tools, writers’ drafting blogs, corporate dark blogs and fictional blogs, to name a few – it can be difficult to imagine how blogs might be used in particular environments. This book demonstrates the take-up of blogs and blogging for a number uses in industrial and social contexts.
Go on, you know you want one!
please update your links to creativitymachine.net
Jul 30th
Dear reader,
Forgive the boring tech update, but…
If your blogroll or newsfeed is still pointing to hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~burgess, please update it to http://creativitymachine.net (blog) or http://creativitymachine.net/feed (RSS feed), cos one day not too far in the future I’ll be deleting everything from the hypertext server, including the .htaccess redirect that is automagically making it look like all the old links still work.
some new developments in web video
Jul 28th
Caught in my tech news net over the last week:
Via Boing Boing, another new ‘meta’ service launches into public beta:
Dabble, a site that makes it possible to search, recommend, rate, discuss and be sociable about video hosted anywhere on the the net, has come out of private beta and launched for public use. Dabbler Lisa Rein sez,
Dabble collects metadata detailing the location, authoring, licensing information, and user-generated tags associated with hundreds of thousands of short video clips. Users visiting Dabble will see a search box allowing them to do a simple keyword search for online video clips. Their results, including both amateur and professional video, will be pulled from hosting sites all over the web. Users can then begin to collect their favorite web videos, adding new videos to their collection at will as they surf other websites.
Already, hundreds of hosting sites exist where users can upload their own videos to the web and thousands of independent sites. Dabble solves the problem of navigating through all these videos, no matter where they are hosted.
By the way, VideoBomb does a similar thing – allows you to ‘republish’ online video from any source without actually copying it (i.e. remains on original server), and then users collaboratively tag and rate it (like social bookmarking services – del.icio.us, digg, reddit – for ‘ordinary’ web content). VideoBomb is a not-for-profit enterprise that also makes the Democracy Player, which is the web’s most popular RSS reader for video content (in effect, a very schmick dynamic web video player for the desktop).
The other day there were some big claims going around for Gotuit – ‘premium content’ video service – being the ‘death of TV’ (because TV is just content, right?) on that basis of offering quantitatively popular commercial content, good user interface, and SUPER fast high quality playback (which I can attest to after playing with it for 5 minutes):
Boston based Gotuit Media launched Gotuit late Sunday evening. Gotuit offers users on-demand free premium content like music videos, sports clips and short films (the stuff that gets deleted from YouTube). Find what you want, click it and watch it immediately.The site is Flash based and will have a familiar interface for YouTube users. This isn’t about long tail user generated content, though. Gotuit has struck licensing deals with labels and other content owners to show a deep library of premium content.
Full story at TechCrunch.
And (it had to happen) see this article, also from TechCrunch on PornoTube. Note the old ‘porn as technological avant-garde’ discourse.
on flickr as a game environment
Jul 24th
I have a section in my chapter on Flickr about the structure of the network as an ‘architecture of participation’, where I go through the various levels of engagement that are possible or invited (from exploring to uploading to commenting to participating in group ‘tasks’ and learning communities, and so on). I know I’m not the first person to have the idea of user-generated content communities as MMOGs, and I am very far from being an expert on game studies, but I’ve found it really productive to think about these issues of structure (or perhaps structuration) through a game design model, which also gets us thinking about participation in the network in terms of multiple forms of play. Here’s a bit of the draft to that effect:
Many computer games, at least at the most obvious level, are a specific, structured form of play that has a clear and final result: they define a win and (sometimes) a loss. At the same time not all play, even within game environments, is ‘ludic’ in precisely this way, instead being characterised by more free-form and player-centred practices that are complementary or parallel to the success imperative. This approach can also be applied to ‘architectures of participation’ like user-generated content communities and, in this case Flickr, on the basis that participation in these environments, as in games, can be viewed as a form of play that occurs in a constrained environment and that offers both individual and social rewards which can be attributed to the actions of the participants. Accordingly, it is appropriate to view Flickr as an open and configurable, but at the same time deeply structured, game environment where a variety of forms of massively multiplayer online play are possible. The second feature of play that makes it a useful tool for the analysis of cultural participation in Flickr is that it is, as Kücklich demonstrates, an appropriate model for the structure-agency problem in new media contexts.
Update: Stewart Butterfield on Game Neverending:
The secret is, even though it’s called Game Neverending, it’s not really a game at all. It’s a social space designed to facilitate and enable play. The game-elements are there to provide both the constraints and the building blocks of interaction – since the thing you’ll notice about the kind of play I’m talking about above is that it is the kind of thing that goes on between people. Ludicorp was started because we imagine all kinds of social computing applications that we’d love to use and participate in, and no one else seems to be building them.
Something there about the pervasiveness of the original design philosophy, I think.
sad news from the LSE
Jul 18th
Via various email lists this morning:
ROGER SILVERSTONE
15 JUNE 1945 – 16 JULY 2006
Convenor, Department of Media and Communications, LSEThe faculty, staff and students mourn the sudden passing of Roger
Silverstone, who died peacefully on 16 July surrounded by his family.
Roger had undergone corrective surgery last week but died of
complications yesterday morning.This news has come as a profound shock to all of us in Roger’s
Department of Media and Communications, the wider LSE community, and
will deeply affect very many people around the world whose lives were
touched by Roger
Way beyond the usual namechecking, Roger’s work has consistently been genuinely useful in my research, and his name crops up in so many conversations about media, method, communication and play, I really do feel his passing as a loss to the profession. My thoughts are with his family and everyone at the LSE.
Portrait of a Textile Worker
Jul 15th
Art quilt project by Terese Agnew:
Portrait of a Textile Worker makes one person among millions of unseen workers visible. Her image was constructed with thirty thousand clothing labels stitched together over two years. The idea came from a simple observation. One day while shopping in a department store I noticed huge signs everywhere — Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Kathy Lee and so on. They were all proper names. I’d recently met two garment workers and realized that by contrast, their identity was rarely thought of and often deliberately hidden. That anonymity could be undone by assembling a view of one worker using the well-known names on apparel she produced. The portrait is based on a photograph of a young textile worker in Bangladesh by Charles Kernaghan.
readings in cultural citizenship and popular culture
Jul 14th
A couple of things I’ve read this morning:
In a special issue of IJCS on ‘The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption’ William Uricchio compares the relationships between creativity (mainly viewed as work within or work that benefits the ‘creative industries’) and cultural citizenship in the US and Europe:
Creative activity – and, by implication, the meaning of creative industries – thus inhabits two very different cultural contexts. The project of using culture as a way of constructing and maintaining identity and as a space the enactment of an expanded notion of citizenship [Europe] contrasts sharply with the use of culture as commodity and the recasting of citizen into consumer [US, esp. since 9/11 which made consumption into civic duty]
Joke Hermes, along with many other cultural studies scholars, has moved 1980s British Cultural Studies arguments about the ‘uses of popular culture’ forward, from the polemical idealisation of ‘pleasure and resistance’, which was intended above all to do something about institutionalised elitism, to a more critical and balanced view:
…it makes sense, first of all, to give credit to Fiske and Hartley’s notion that popular culture may be understood as democracy at work. But it also means that we should review whether popular culture is truly democratic in its effects: What kind of citizenship is (cultural) citizenship? And how does it exclude as well as include? (p. 2)
Rather than being concerned with rights and representations, or even identity politics (cf. Rosaldo), Hermes is interested in how
cultural citizenship as a term can also be used in relation to less formal everyday practices of identity construction, representation, and ideology, and implicit moral obligations and rights
After a quite detailed critique of both Miller (who she finds a bit too pessimistic) and more recent work by Hartley (a bit too utopian, but only a bit), Hermes offers the following definition:
Cultural citizenship can be defined as the process of bonding and community building, and reflection on that bonding, that is implied in partaking of the text-related practices of reading, consuming, celebrating, and criticizing offered in the realm of (popular) culture
By her own admission, there is a lot left out here, and all the definitions I’ve found so far need something more built into them if they’re going to work in terms of the transformation in what we mean by ‘popular culture’ – the convergences between everyday life, creative production and consumption and social life that feature most prominentaly at the sites of vernacular creativity in digital culture. I love this metaphor though:
Popular cultural texts and practices are important because they provide much of the wool from which the social tapestry is knit.
Urban Brisbane Photo Exhibition
Jul 12th
Yay! A showcase of work from three members of the Brisbanites Flickr group:
Manfreds Bar, The Valley
Thursday 20th July, 7:00pmA collection of photographs will be on display which seek to explore Brisbane and some of it’s lesser-known areas both above and below the city streets. These may be the things you walk past everyday unnoticed or the areas which only a few brave souls would dare travel.
What’s on Show: Architecture, Tunnels, Abandoned Buildings, Cemeteries, Cityscapes, Rail Yards, etc. Various styles, B&W, Color, Night, Day, Abstract, Still life.
The exhibition will be held at Manfreds Bar in the Valley, Thursday 20th July from 7pm onwards showcasing the works of three local photographers. Entry is free and all canvas prints displayed will be available for purchase on the night.
Manfreds Bar
Thursday 20th July, 7:00 pm
293 Brunswick Street
Fortitude Valley, 4006
Tel: 07 3854 1881
vernacular literacy
Jul 12th
I don’t want ‘vernacular’ to become another ubiquitous adjective that I just stick in front of every ‘traditional’ cultural category, just like ‘e’ went in front of every Foucauldian discourse/institution 10 years ago (e-education, e-medicine, e-government). Especially considering that I’ve only recently added Nava’s ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism‘ to the pile of readings for my thesis on ‘vernacular creativity’, AND Henry Jenkins already uses ‘vernacular media’, PLUS what I gain from working with participants is some illumination of what a ‘vernacular theory‘ of creativity and cultural participation would look like. But in preparing my AoIR paper I’ve begun sketching out something that includes the phrase ‘vernacular literacy’. Very rough thoughts as of 5 minutes ago:
Just as it is possible to speak of ‘vernacular creativity’ as a field of cultural production that is structurally outside of, but nevertheless references and is referenced by the artworlds and commercial media, it is also possible to talk about ‘vernacular literacy’. There are two levels to this concept which follow from the duality of literacy as both a field of contestation and a site of (or means to?) practice, and which I outlined above in the more general discussion of the cultural politics of new media literacy.
First, it is possible to talk about ‘vernacular literacies’ as part of the practice of everyday content creation. That is, the range of everyday competencies that constitute what people can already ‘do’ creatively, and the local, social contexts in which those practices are embedded. Secondly, these sites of vernacular creativity are also the location for vernacular theories (cf. McLaughlin) of literacy – where transpositions of ‘official’ debates around literacy are worked through at a local level, especially at moments of perceived technological ‘newness’, such as with digital culture.
I will go away and ruminate on all that, I think. But it could be a good way into the ’stuff’ of my case studies.
And here is what a Google search turns up for the phrase in question.
Mica Nava on ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’
Jul 11th
In the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society on Cosmopolitanism – (19.1-2):
Cosmopolitan Modernity : Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference
Mica Nava
Debates about cosmopolitanism in the spheres of political philosophy, sociology and postcolonial criticism have on the whole ignored specific histories of the cosmopolitan imagination and its vernacular expressions in everyday life. This article draws on aspects of the urban and often feminized worlds of entertainment, commerce, the arts and the emotions in metropolitan England during the first decades of the 20th century, in which an interest in abroad and cultural ‘others’ increasingly signalled an engagement with the new, in order to argue for a notion of cosmopolitan modernity. This should be understood not just as a reflexive stance of openness, but also as a dialogic formation – a counterculture – part of a psychic and often gendered revolt against the conservatism and xenophobia of the parental culture.
Keywords; allure of difference, counterculture, English modernity, vernacular cosmopolitanism, women
